Topdown

Samit spent over two decades in enterprise sales and relationship management, witnessing firsthand how large organizations struggled to digitize and automate operations across their partner ecosystems. While most SaaS companies focused on direct-to-customer digital transformation, he saw a massive gap: nobody was solving the partner relationship management (PRM) problem at scale. The insight was simple but powerful—in a world moving toward "Ecosystem 2.0," companies with thousands of partners, distributors, and agents needed automated workflows to recruit, onboard, enable, and market through these channels. That's what led him to start Topdown.

Topdown positioned itself as an enterprise-first PRM platform focused on large organizations. The initial focus landed on financial services and insurance—verticals where the partner ecosystem is complex and sprawling. The team, now at 25 in-house plus 15 external consultants and SMEs, built a platform to handle partner recruitment, onboarding, enablement, and marketing automation. Rather than chasing SMBs with inbound strategies, Topdown deliberately chose the harder path: enterprise sales through deep account-based marketing.

Samit's two decades in enterprise gave him credibility and a network. Topdown adopted a hyper-targeted account-based marketing approach, identifying exactly which companies they could serve. In India's insurance vertical alone, they identified roughly 20-30 top players and set a goal to close 12. They mapped executives on LinkedIn, nurtured them with letters and ads, and executed a disciplined outbound strategy. The model worked: they now have 8-10 large enterprise customers, including several top 10 insurance and financial services companies, each with 1,000+ users.

The land-and-expand model proved critical. Topdown starts with pilot customers (3-6 months), often at smaller user counts (100-5,000 users), then expands as the customer sees value and rolls out to their full partner network. This approach generated significant upsells and cross-sells—revenue per customer grew as they scaled usage within existing accounts. The founder's enterprise background and account-based marketing discipline worked; the company went from ~$250K ARR in December to ~$400K ARR a few months later without adding many new customers, proving expansion revenue dominates their growth. What's notably absent: they're still entirely bootstrapped and profitable, turning down venture capital to maintain control.

As of the interview, Topdown was doing $35K MRR ($420K annualized) with 8-10 enterprise customers. The roadmap is ambitious: deepen the PRM platform with new modules, expand vertically into edtech and healthtech (which also have ecosystem plays with tutors, resellers, franchisees), expand geographically into Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines), and eventually build an SMB inbound product. By December, they aim to double revenue. The founder's first target is hitting $1M ARR before considering external funding or exit—he believes execution matters more than money.